Don’t become a #nenshinoun **

That is the title of last night’s run. Lori and I have had a few epic runs, and last night’s is also going down as EPIC. Epicly stupid perhaps, but epic nonetheless.

We decided to do our long run last night (Friday night) due to some scheduling issues on the weekend. This is a cutback week, so we were just doing 14km’s, a totally doable weeknight distance. We had also thought about running from Edworthy along the Bow river. We hadn’t run here since the floods here in Calgary, so were curious to see what kind of damage had been done to the paths. Then we changed our plans, let’s run somewhere closer to home to save time, and then we changed back… and then we didn’t really think through our route at all.

I drove down to Edworthy through some heavy rain, traffic was slow because of the standing water on the roads. I didn’t think much of it, except, ‘we’re gonna get wet’. That was true.

We started to run heading North to cross the river, and quickly thought, ‘No, let’s stay south’ because we knew there was some pathway damage to the north. The gate was closed on the south side of the river, indicating it was closed, we circumvented the gate and kept going. The first couple km’s were uneventful, then suddenly the path dropped off into the river… ok first sign of damage. We decided to take a dirt path from here, we are very familiar with this path and it wasn’t a huge deal. Immediately we hit massive puddle after puddle. We gave up on keeping our feet dry and just ran through them. It was also bucketing rain at this point, so we knew dry wasn’t going to happen. Suddenly there was yellow tape blocking the path, and a GIANT lake in the middle of the path… um ok, now what? And then a giant crack of thunder that felt like it was right on top of us. We both suddenly wondered if we should be there. We were 3-4 km’s from our cars at this point, and in the middle of nowhere. I looked to the left and it looked like the ‘path’ (more like a muddy dirt trail through the trees) carried on in that direction. We decided to keep going, it was closer to find shelter in this direction then to go back towards our cars.

We kept running, constantly meeting with dead ends where the path just fell into the river, then we would reroute ourselves. We did this for another km or so until we got to the Crowchild bridge. There were people hunkering down under the bridge. What did we do? We just picked up the pace and kept going. The pathway was pretty undamaged from here on out, there were just places where there was mud and silt on the path, but no missing sections. It was raining hard, but the thunder and lightening had mostly passed.

The rest of the run was fairly unexciting, we turned around just before 7 km’s, crossed to the other side of the river at the Crowchild bridge, avoided all the crazy mud, puddles and missing pathways on the south side of the river. Our pace was still fast, we were still getting bucketed on, and were totally drenched.

All in all, we ran 14 km’s in 1:19 (a 5:40/km or 9:05/mi pace), laughed our asses off, got completely drenched, and had one of the most fun Friday night’s I’ve had in a while 🙂

** If you’re not from Calgary and are wondering what the heck a ‘nenshinoun’ is… Nenshi is our mayor, and he has been trending locally on twitter. Here are a couple of Nenshi quotes and trending images to explain…

*** If you are from Calgary, and it isn’t obvious at this point, the South side of the pathway at Edworthy park is closed… for good reason. The gate is closed… for good reason. Lesson learned 🙂